But first…a word from the Sewer

So this isn’t the newsletter I intended to write. I was working on a piece about how to replace municipal politicians who act poorly when I saw the news that 900 CHML had been taken off the air rather abruptly. I intended to just make reference to it, but accidentally fell down a wormhole and wrote the following piece. In doing so, I realized I had to scrap almost everything else in the newsletter. I hope I’ll get to all that soon.

What started off as a simple look into the date 900 CHML started turned into another tile in the ever-growing Sewer Socialists tapestry of Hamilton’s history. This story has everything from petty municipal political battles to prohibition. Yeah, 900 CHML exists mostly because of prohibition. Sorry for that becoming a core feature of the newsletter this summer. And for always being a day late.

After spending a frantic 48 hours writing this piece, I’ve come to realize that, sometimes, I need a little extra time to tell a story right. I often go hard on obscure facts because, in a rush to get something out, I don’t give myself enough time to edit out all the unnecessary little stuff. You deserve a clean, coherent, compelling story that references our past and helps us understand our present. That means that I may not be able to meet my Thursday deadline, but I hope the end product is better for it.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this look at a local institution and the colourful characters around it.

Many happy hours of innocent amusement

There was no notice or fanfare. No warning, no winddown, no time to say goodbye. Just 26 seconds of a prerecorded announcement.

“We have some important news to share with you,” the voice on the recording said. “Today, after decades of serving the great City of Hamilton, we want to inform you that we will be closing 900 CHML. We want to express our gratitude to each and every one of you in the community and, most importantly, our advertisers and our listeners. You are the cornerstone of our station’s legacy. Thank you.”

And then static. An hour later, the receivers were switched off and even the static died.

Nearly 100 years of radio history ended abruptly on Wednesday, August 14, 2024. CHML, 900 on the AM dial, was shuttered with jarring speed by its corporate parent, Corus Entertainment. With that, Hamilton lost another media outlet, albeit one that had been in decline for the past quarter century as Corus sought to maximize profits and people shifted from radio to streaming.

But the history of 900 CHML is worth considering. Because, for a very long time, it provided Hamiltonians another source of news and entertainment, reflecting the importance of this city as a place that mattered. And CHML’s leadership went on to create other media outlets that, to this day, teeter ever-so close to oblivion. So let’s look at 900 CHML - the reason it was started, what it contributed to the community, and what its loss means for all of us.

CKOC of the walk

900 CHML was, in its final years, Hamilton’s talk radio station. But it started out as an all-purpose outlet, born, as so many things in Hamilton are, from a disagreement.

On May 1, 1922, Hamilton’s first radio station went on the air. That station, CKOC 1150 AM, had a fairly standard broadcast program for its first few years. Radio stations at the time presented a mix of classical and common music (with some coming from local talent and school bands), news updates, and regular sermons from Christian preachers.

One of those preachers was the Reverend Dr. James E. Hughson, pastor of the First United Church at the corner of King East and Wellington South (the namesake of today’s First Place). First United was, from 1824 to 1925, the First Methodist Church, but was one of the congregations that opted to join the new United Church of Canada in 1925. Despite the move to what would eventually become one of the most liberal Christian denominations in the world, First United initially maintained much of the evangelical conservatism inherent to Methodism at the time. By all accounts, Hughson was the perfect fit for the traditional congregation.

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By 1926, Hughson’s sermons were a regular feature of CKOC’s broadcast lineup, piped directly into the homes of Hamiltonians on Sundays. In early June, he preached a radio sermon on “Starting the Day Right”. In late August, he spoke about “The Art of Doing Good”. There was a special broadcast in mid-September at 6:15 PM entitled “Youth and Its Ideals”, where Dr. Hughson was accompanied by the “Seventy-Voiced Choir”, giving listeners proselytizing and a show. A little dash of the ol’ razzle dazzle to make the moralizing go down easier.

In early November of that year, the Reverend Dr. Hughson decided to turn his attention to current affairs. The province was just weeks away from a general election which (as I noted a few weeks ago) Premier George Ferguson had turned into a campaign about ending prohibition. Fergie promised that, if his Conservatives were reelected, he would legalize government sales of alcohol. The opposition Liberals and brand new Progressive Party took the side of the prohibitionists and campaigned hard against alcohol.

Mirroring the politics of his parishioners, Hughson espoused strong support for prohibition. This, predictably, made its way into his early November sermon. The addition of politics to the pulpit did not sit well with those Hamiltonians who tuned in, seeing his sermon as more of a political statement than a faith-based one.

Hamiltonians, having voted strongly in favour of government sales of alcohol in the 1924 referendum, were outraged. The owners of CKOC, the Wentworth Radio Company, and station manager Herbert Slack were inundated by angry letters from residents who called Hughson’s sermon a backdoor advertisement for the Liberals, which went over poorly in sapphire-blue Conservative Hamilton. Slack was horrified at the backlash and promised listeners that there would be no more talk of prohibition during religious broadcasts on CKOC.

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On the evening of Sunday, November 21, airtime on CKOC had been given to the Reverend Dr. L.F. Dimmitt from Centenary United Church. Like First United, Centenary joined the United flock from the Methodist tradition, but catered to the residents further west in the downtown core. Dimmitt was a relatively new addition to Hamilton, having moved to the city from Winnipeg less than two years earlier upon being invited by what was then Centenary Methodist to be their pastor.

Dimmitt decided to speak on a topic he called “Can We Control the Liquor Traffic?” drawing on his experiences with Manitoba’s attempt at government liquor sales. After some music and passages from the Bible, Dimmitt began his sermon with local residents listening in on CKOC. As he began to discuss government sales of liquor, listeners heard a crackle and then a long period of silence. CKOC made the decision to simply terminate its broadcast at the mention of the word “prohibition”. Only when Dimmitt’s sermon had ended did CKOC begin broadcasting once again.

The dimming of Dimmitt set off a political firestorm in Hamilton. The very next day, the Hamilton Prohibition Union had a back-page advertisement in the Spec calling CKOC out for their decision.

In that same edition, the Spec spoke with both Dimmitt and Slack. For his part, Dimmitt said that he merely wanted to speak about his experiences in Manitoba and that his church had a clear contract with CKOC to allow his sermons to be broadcast. “I made no reference to the fight in Ontario, and there was not a word in my talk that could have been offensive to even the most radical Conservative,” he told the Spec. The paper, firmly endorsing the Conservative line on government sales of liquor, did little to make Dimmitt seem reasonable, with the Spec reporter to whom he was speaking less-than-subtly noting the minister “grew more emphatic as he proceeded with his explanation.”

Slack responded by saying that Dimmitt’s sermon amounted to an endorsement of the Liberal Party, noting that a prominent Hamilton Liberal, John Newlands, had already spoken on the issue on Saturday as a representative of his party. When Dimmitt began to speak in favour of prohibition, he was making a political statement rather than providing a sermon, Slack said, rather bluntly telling the paper “I have never read of…government control [of liquor sales] in the Bible.”1

The next day, CKOC fired back, calling the Hamilton Prohibition Union ad “misleading” in an ad of their own that implored “fair-minded radio listeners, judge for yourselves.” The ad included a particularly enflaming quote from Slack, which read: “It has been necessary for us to notify the churches operating through our station that is it not in accord with our policies to broadcast political propaganda from the pulpits of the churches who have enjoyed the privilege's of our station.”2

A few days later, Premier Ferguson’s Conservatives were reelected in a landslide and began undoing prohibition once-and-for-all. But community anger over the perceived silencing of anti-liquor views on the city’s only radio station lingered. For one Hamiltonian in particular, the actions of CKOC were unforgivable. But, in the aftermath of Dimmitt’s late November silencing, that particular Hamiltonian also saw an opportunity.

Liquorless Lees

George Harman Lees was a Hamiltonian, through-and-through. Born in the city, he was educated in Hamilton’s public schools, apprenticed with his uncle (a well-respected Hamilton jeweler), and, in 1886, started his own jewelry business on Main Street at age 26.

As with all civic-minded middle class businessmen of his time, Lees was in every possible social club and organization in the city. He was a 32nd degree Mason with the Scottish Rite, involved with the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, and a volunteer with the Woodmen of the World. But, closest to Lees’ heart were faith and temperance.

A committed Methodist and zealous prohibition advocate, Lees became synonymous with the crusade against alcohol in Hamilton. Lees was so closely associated with the cause, that, in 1900, when two advocates of ranked choice voting held a mock election to show how a proportional representation would work during an open meeting at city hall, Lees was their faux candidate from the Prohibition Party. Despite over 100 people participating in the fantasy election, Lees received no votes.3

Lees was a high-ranking board member with the Royal Templars of Temperance and, for a time, the president of the Hamilton Prohibition Union. His passion for the cause led to some early local notoriety and, in 1893, he was named the chairman of the pro-prohibition committee for the province’s first referendum on the issue on January 1, 1894, the same day as municipal elections across the province. The pro-prohibition forces realized Lees was a compelling political figure and quickly encouraged him to also seek an aldermanic seat in Ward 2 (which, at the time, ran from Bay to Ferguson and from King Street south to the escarpment, covering portions of Durand and Corktown).

He had two major wins on New Year’s Day, 1894. The prohibition referendum passed with overwhelming support (it would be nearly two decades before proper prohibition came into force) and Lees won his Ward 2 seat. That began a scattered career in local politics for Lees. From 1894 to 1911, Lees would periodically serve on Hamilton city council, leading what the Spec would call a “temperance slate” of varying sizes and intensity.4

Lees left council in 1898 but sought a return nearly a decade later after Hamilton had introduced an at-large voting system for aldermen (rather than elect alderman by ward, a collection of 21 representatives were elected by Hamiltonians from across the city). On the first leg of his comeback tour, he ran as a candidate of the “Conservative and Board of Trade slate”.5 He won that race, but quickly abandoned the Tories to run with an official “Temperance slate”, earning the ire of the city’s Conservative establishment. They campaigned hard against their traitorous former colleague, and he lost reelection by a sizable margin.6 

After Hamilton moved back to a ward system for the 1909 election, Lees jumped back into local politics, soliciting help from the city’s prohibitionist forces to campaign for one of the three open aldermanic seats available in Ward 2. To his benefit, the prohibitionists had begun to organize more formally, creating a group called the “Citizens Campaign Committee” (CCC) in late 1908.7 This effort worked and Lees was back on council for a third time, much to the chagrin of local Conservatives who wanted rid of the meddlesome prohibitionist.8

By September of that year, Lees had been named the vice-president of the CCC, which had been hard at work lobbying city council to slash the number of hotel liquor licences to just 50 by the end of 1909. Their efforts encountered significant resistance from the “wet” Tories on council, but the CCC would not be deterred, even threatening to run one of the Temperance slate aldermen against the moderate reform-oriented Mayor John McLaren.9

While Lees’ name was circulated as a potential candidate, he opted instead to run for a seat on the new Board of Control (the four-member executive elected at-large across the whole city who, in addition to serving on council, dealt with money issues). As an ardent prohibitionist, Lees once again ran afoul of the dominant faction of the Conservative Party machine. He was unsuccessful in winning a controller’s seat, but spent all of 1910 working with the CCC to dramatically cut the number of watering holes in Hamilton.10 

During this time, Lees saddled up next to the city’s Liberal machine and began preparing himself for a mayoral run as a Liberal-Temperance candidate. In early September, under the auspices of launching a new anti-hotel liquor licence campaign with the “Hamilton Temperance Federation”, Lees held what can only be described as an early mayoral campaign rally.11 

Within a few weeks, the CCC had struck a subcommittee tasked with “pressuring” Lees to run for mayor who had clearly already decided he would run. By November 1, 1910, he formally announced his candidacy, claiming to be independent of any party structure while earning the support of the CCC and the Liberal-aligned Hamilton Herald.12 The Spectator and the city’s “wet” Tory establishment campaigned vigourously against Lees, whom they called an “extremist” on the temperance question. Instead, they backed Conservative stalwart John Allan for mayor who, in an effort to win over hesitant prohibitionists, said he would vote to reduce hotel liquor licences if a plebiscite on the matter was approved by a majority of voters in the city.13

In a major upset, Lees won the mayoral race by a comfortable margin, putting the city’s most prominent prohibitionist in charge. Despite his fervor for the cause of temperance, Lees appeared to do little on that front, opting instead to focus on expanding the city’s tax base and quietly appeasing the Conservative establishment that had campaigned so hard against him. His efforts were rewarded for the election of 1912 when he was acclaimed as mayor for a second term.

But that was it for Lees. He served his two terms as mayor before quietly announcing he wouldn’t seek a third term in 1913, handing power back to the Tories and giving John Allan the mayoral prize he always wanted. In the years after his time in office, Lees became the president of the Hamilton YMCA, carrying on with his prohibition work, and becoming more involved with his church, First Methodist, where he would become treasurer and eventually end up quite close with the church’s minister, the Reverend Dr. James E. Hughson.

Maple Leaf v Wentworth

Thirteen years later, Lees was one of the figures behind the Hamilton Prohibition Union ad in the Spec that took aim at CKOC. Even after the Conservatives were reelected and began dismantling prohibition, Lees still maintained a grudge against CKOC and the Wentworth Radio Company. But after his time in the halls of power and building up a considerable fortune as a local manufacturer, Lees was in a position to do something about the city’s radio monopoly.

Through early 1927, Lees, high-ups in the First United Church, and some business associates were hard at work laying the foundation for what would become CHML. They began by creating their own broadcasting company, Maple Leaf Radio Co. Ltd. From their company name, they got their callsign: C for Canada, H for Hamilton, and ML for Maple Leaf.

These were early days for the broadcasting industry. The first licenced radio station in Canada, Montreal’s XWA (later CFCF, CIQC, CINW, and, finally, AM940), had only started broadcasting a decade earlier. CKOC itself was one of the first commercial stations in the country to receive a licence under an expanded government licencing regime. To start a new station meant not only securing licences and starting companies, but also finding office space, buying the equipment that made transmission possible, and, in the case of Maple Leaf Radio, literally constructing the radio transmission towers themselves.

Lees and the Maple Leaf Radio folks spent a long time scouting out sites across the city. To their benefit, Hamilton’s escarpment offered a natural boost to their signal, giving an extra 120 metres (400 feet) to whatever broadcasting tower they built. In 1927, the mountaintop community was still very small, affording them plenty of options for building their new radio transmission tower. In the end, they went with the simplest choice: a prime piece of real estate just to the southeast of the Jolly Cut (off of what is today’s East 13th Street). From the 18 metre-high (60 feet) transmission towers atop the mountain, specially-laid wires ran all the way down the escarpment and through Stinson before darting a little west to their new offices in the backroom of an appliance store at 222 King Street East, near the intersection of King and Walnut.14

By Wednesday, September 28, 1927, the whole operation was ready to debut to the people of Hamilton. But they weren’t content to just flip on the switch and start broadcasting. They wanted to open with a real show.

They decided to host an open house where any curious Hamiltonian could see the station, speak with the announcers, and learn about how radio worked. Opening night’s entertainment included performances by The Melody Boys, the Hamilton Public School Chorus, and Smith the Whistler. To top things off, Mayor Freeman Treleaven and the city controllers spoke to commemorate the station’s first broadcast.

As this full-page newspaper ad in the Spec informed Hamiltonians, the Maple Leaf Radio Co. declared that CHML would be “A Service to the Community”, hoping that Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton would have “many happy hours of innocent amusement” listening to the city’s newest radio station. All around the ad were smaller advertisements for places Hamiltonians could pick up a shiny new radio. Synergy!

Four days later, on Sunday, October 2, 1927, at 6:30 PM, CHML broadcast a live sermon from the Reverend Dr. James E. Hughson entitled “There Are Many Voices in the World, and None of Them Without Significance.” There’s no record of it, but it is unlikely that sermon was interrupted by station management.15

Enter the wunderkind

Lees remained deeply involved with the station over the next few years to the point of micromanagement. An example of this comes from former Burlington councillor Bob Wood, who shared a story about Lees (who was, in typical Hamilton small-word fashion, his great-grandfather) on social media after CHML closed.

Lees kept a radio on his desk, listening in to CHML broadcasts throughout the day. Some time after the station opened, Lees was listening in as one of the station’s disc jockeys dropped the needle on a record of a classic old world polka. In Czech, the name of the polka is “Škoda lásky” but, in English, it’s more commonly known as the “Beer Barrel Polka”. That, predictably, did not sit well with Hamilton’s foremost prohibitionist. In a fit of rage, Lees got up, left his home on Delaware Ave, and walked the 30 minutes west to the station. He stormed into the studio, demanded to see the record, and, when it was presented, proceeded to smash it into pieces as his way of expressing his feelings about the music.16

Living as active a life as Lees did took its toll and, shortly after his 74th birthday, he sold the station to Arthur Hardy, a Liberal senator from Brockville. A year and a half later, Lees died at home in what would be a dark week for Hamilton’s former mayors; George Coppley, who served as mayor eight years after Lees left office, died a few days before him.17

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Senator Hardy was much more hands-off when it came to CHML, though he did make one very consequential decision: hiring Ken Soble in 1937.

Soble, at that time, was already a radio wunderkind. At age 17, after leaving school to help support his family, Soble accidentally entered the world of radio broadcasting. As legend has it, Soble came across a woman in desperate need of a ride to work. Her workplace, it turns out, was a local radio station and she was famed broadcaster Jane Gray. Liking the young Soble’s moxie, she gave him a chance to speak on air, and he so impressed the station’s management that he got a job.

By age 25, Soble had already begun innovating in the Canadian radio market, starting ambitious new programs modeled after ones he had heard of from the United States. His most popular, “Ken Soble’s Amateur Hour”, was quickly picked up by a handful of radio stations across southern Ontario. A star on the rise, Soble was soon sought after to be the MC at events across the province, though ended up spending a lot of time in Hamilton, judging beauty contests, hosting sporting events, and headlining shows at the Tivoli Theatre.

This rising star caught the eye of Senator Hardy, who quickly convinced Soble to become the managing director of CHML. Just days after his appointment was announced, Soble restructured the station’s programming and announced a version of his “Amateur Hour” show would be put on every Sunday at 12:30 PM.18 

Among Soble’s innovations was the ambitious and controversial move to hire a woman announcer. This was doubtless thanks to Soble’s own path into the business, but nonetheless created an opportunity for Peggy Myers, the station’s stenographer who was promoted to the role after a few successful performances during a live radio play. The Spec, in announcing her appointment, spent considerable time describing Myers’ appearance (“pretty and prim”), hair colour (“semi-blonde”), height (“four feet, 11 1/2 inches”), and voice (“not the usual soprano”), though did seem optimistic that she could “break the ice of prejudice surrounding women radio announcers.”19 Progress.

There was an interesting little clause in Soble’s contract that stated he was allowed to bid for the Maple Leaf Radio Co. if Hardy ever gave it up. And, in 1942, the senator did just that. Soble beat out other big bidders and found himself, at age 31, owning the station and the broadcasting company he worked for. Not long after buying out the station, he hired the woman who got him his start in the business, Jane Gray, to host an on-air advice show for women.

He came out swinging with new projects and ideas. Most boldly, in 1945, Soble petitioned to allow Hamilton city council meetings to be broadcast live on CHML. He received approval, but Ward 3 councillor Ellen Fairclough objected with intensity. Fairclough attempted to stop Soble’s broadcasts, so Soble, ever the showman, sent reporters out to get comments from Hamiltonians just walking down the street on whether they thought council meetings should be broadcast live. The response was so overwhelmingly positive that Fairclough backed down, and council meetings were carried by CHML from 1945 to 1957.20

But it wasn’t just council meetings that marked new territory for CHML. In 1948, Soble hired Jackie Washington, the acclaimed blues musician, to host a show in the prime Saturday 1:00 PM timeslot, making him the first Black radio announcer in the city. And, in 1949, Soble made the decision to keep CHML broadcasting 24/7. Prior to that, the station closed up shop at midnight and came back on around 5:00 in the morning. It was also around this time that CHML packed up their backroom studios and moved into striking new art deco-style offices at the corner of Main and Springer Avenue in the Blakely neighbourhood which are still standing to this day.

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Soble grew to know his industry in a profound way and knew that, to survive, it was sometimes necessary to diversify the business. He loved radio, but when the television became a popular new medium, he refused to be left behind. In the early 1950’s, Soble started laying the groundwork for a brand new, Hamilton-based television station. As ambitious as Soble was, he couldn’t go it alone, so he created a new company - Niagara Television Ltd. - which was an equal partnership between his CHML, rival CKOC, and the Spec’s publisher, the Southam Company. With this dynamic coalition of local media behind him, Soble became the lead behind a bold adventure in broadcasting: CHCH-TV. Just as CHML’s call sign meant something, so too did CHCH’s: C for Canada and H for Hamilton. The letters, Soble told a meeting of the Junior Chamber of Commerce, “seemed so adequate and appropriate that they had been repeated.”21 CHCH was a CBC-affiliated station until 1961 when Soble made the decision to turn his television venture into an independent outlet in order to provide viewers more diversity. One of the most popular programs on CHCH was a television version of “Ken Soble’s Amateur Hour” from the radio, adapted to the screen and aimed primarily at showcasing the talent of Hamilton’s youth. But, in adapting the show for television, Soble decided it needed a new name, eventually settling on the iconic name: Tiny Talent Time.

Soble was a man on-the-go who rarely had time to stop. Between CHML and CHCH, he also bought the Hamilton Forum arena on Barton, bought the Hamilton Tigers semi-pro hockey team, became an enthusiastic early donor for McMaster’s medical school, and, in 1961, was asked by Mayor Lloyd Jackson to help solve the city’s housing and “urban blight” problem. A year later, the provincial government named him the first chair of the Ontario Housing Corporation, where he oversaw the construction of social housing for people across the province. In a striking innovation, Soble refused to build social housing all in one area, opting instead to sprinkle developments throughout communities to create mixed-income communities.

Active in the Beth Jacob Synagogue, on the board of the Hamilton Art Gallery, and as a member of the Hamilton Club, Soble never really stopped moving. Even after he was hospitalized in November of 1966 for overwork and exhaustion, he refused to stay longer than he thought he needed.

On Wednesday, December 14, 1966, he checked himself out of the hospital to get back to work. Two days later, he suffered a massive heart attack at his home on Forsyth Avenue North and died at age 55.22

Corporate decline

After his death, Soble’s estate didn’t know what to do with his holdings. They eventually decided to sell CHML to a businessman from Burnaby, BC named Frank Griffiths. Through his company, Western Broadcasting, Griffiths had a handful of media properties on the west coast, but wanted to expand his empire. CHML seemed like the perfect legacy addition.

Under new ownership, CHML plodded along modestly through the 1970’s, though it became clear that the station was nothing like the dynamic and adaptable enterprise it was under Soble’s leadership. A hostile bid from rival Toronto station CFRB to buy out CHML was turned down by the government, leaving the station firmly in the hands of Western Broadcasting.

By the late 1980’s, things had started to change for CHML. They left their art deco offices downtown and relocated to a new shopping plaza in Westdale that had been built on the site of the popular local landmark, Paddy Greene’s Hotel. That same year, one of CHML’s longest serving radio personalities, Paul Hanover, announced that, after 41 years, he was moving to rival CKOC and their new FM station, CKLH. That station would, by 1992, be known as 102.9 K-Lite FM.

More and more stations were popping up and competition for the AM dial grew fierce. Along with the growing popularity of the FM dial, things started to become dire for CHML. By 1988, CHML’s listenership began sinking dramatically, dropping by over a quarter in the winter of that year.23 To counter this, a new group calling itself “Hometown Radio” tried to buy CHML. Hometown was a project of Don Luzzi and the Dofasco employees’ credit union which hoped to keep CHML focused on local issues. Their application, like CFRB’s, was quickly turned down by the government.

In a bid to revive their flagging fortunes, CHML reacquired the rights to broadcast Ti-Cats football and lured one of their biggest names back to the station. He had left in 1977 to bounce between stations in Kitchener and Toronto, but the return of Ti-Cats games to the CHML airwaves in 1989 also meant the triumphant return of their velvet-voiced play-by-play announcer: Bob Bratina. Bob would host a variety of shows on CHML off-and-on, even after being elected to city council in Ward 2, only giving up the airwaves after being elected mayor in 2010.24

While CHML had debuted “talk radio”-style programs in the 1950’s, they had begun to lean more heavily on these kinds of call-in shows to keep their ratings from further sinking. The radio personalities they began to profile, like Roy Green and John Hardy, soon developed a penchant for generating controversy. This boiled over in 1993 when a community group calling itself “The Committee for Conscience in Broadcasting” (CCB) formed to specifically protest the angry, often extreme right-wing populism espoused on the airwaves. The group took issue with the shows “blaming our problems on the most vulnerable members of society - including women, visible minorities, the poor, the disabled,” specifically highlighting the anti-immigrant, anti-poor, and anti-queer language on CHML. In one upsetting instance, a host was called out for allowing a caller to explicitly advocate for publicly murdering queer people in Hamilton.

As a CCB spokesperson said at a press conference: “The people of Hamilton tuned in [to] CHML to know what was happening here. CHML brought the people of this community together…CHML has turned from ‘Hamilton Radio’ to ‘Ugly Radio’.”25 When CHML’s licence came up for renewal in 1995, both CCB and the Hamilton Mayor's Committee Against Racism and Discrimination both raised objections due to the increasingly extreme rhetoric that had found a home at the station. The CRTC investigated and found that, while CHML did not violate any broadcast standards, “the Commission expects the licensee [CHML] to be sensitive to the concerns raised in the intervention that minority groups in the community are too often represented in a negative manner.”26

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After Griffiths’ death in 1994, his family, like Soble’s, wanted out of the business. A series of complicated deals were made between Western Broadcasting, Shaw, and Global CanWest. Hamilton’s media market was an afterthought to the corporate giants, which were jockeying for control over the largest share of Western Broadcasting’s portfolio, namely a series of television stations in Alberta. At this point, both CHML and CHCH were owned by Western Broadcasting, meaning the decision about ownership of the company would impact much of Hamilton’s local news. In 1999, all parties to the deal finally came to an agreement: Global could have the television assets while Shaw’s radio division (which had, at the time, recently rebranded to Corus Entertainment), would take the radio stations.

And then the layoffs began. In the initial change, around two dozen people lost their jobs. The station was quietly slimmed down over the next few years, with many prominent broadcasters leaving or, in the case of Bratina, resigning for…opportunities elsewhere. In 2017, Corus rebranded the station as “Global News Radio 900 CHML”. Then, last year, they started axing some of the big names, like Bill Kelly, the former Ward 7 councillor and 2006 Liberal candidate on Hamilton Mountain who, after leaving politics, took over the morning slot from controversial host Roy Green. It was almost exactly one year ago, without much warning, that Kelly was let go in the same round of layoffs that hit the station’s program director.27

And then, on the 14th of August, the station’s unceremonious end. 26 seconds of a prerecorded announcement, static, then silence.

Media in a city that matters

So, what does losing CHML mean?

It is genuinely hard to say in large part because I’m not even sure which CHML we’ve lost. There were different eras in the history of CHML: the prohibitionist’s organ until 1935, the eager and ambitious station owned by a civic-minded dynamo until 1966, the forgotten holding in a western entrepreneur’s portfolio until 1994, and just another ledger line for a Canadian corporate giant until a few days ago.

That, I think, is the main takeaway. Yes, it is sad that we’ve lost an institution, but that institution wasn’t the same one that crackled to life that September morning in 1927. It wasn’t even the go-getter station of Ken Soble that brought diversity and innovation and a unique focus on civic affairs to Hamiltonians in the golden era of mass media.

There was a time that CHML could have begun to pivot. It held onto the talk radio baton for years, but could have begun to earnestly invest in local affairs shows and, eventually, podcasts in the early 2000’s. It could have plucked interesting young journalists and sound engineers and producers from Mohawk and McMaster and the community at-large and done something interesting. It could have brought the spirit of Soble’s CHML back and brought news and information to the people of Hamilton during that brief glimmer of a moment a few years ago when it seemed like we had momentum on our side.

Could have. Had it not been for Corus, that is. If the station were locally-owned and drew on local talent - not just in the newsroom, but across the board - then maybe, just maybe, it could have pivoted. But, as corporate consolidation ramps up and Canada sleepwalks toward full-blown oligarchy, those kinds of decisions will happen less and less. Sitting down with a local board of people who care about the brand and institution and convincing them to make a unique shift would be a hell of a lot easier than trying to convince a boardroom, stuffed with profit-obsessed MBAs, in some capital management company’s headquarters in Toronto of the same.

Ultimately, it wasn’t a changing marketplace or declining listenership that killed CHML. CHML began really dying in the 1990’s when it became another disposable asset to be traded between corporate giants. We can say the same thing about most news in Canada, honestly.

And that’s why we need more non-profit and public news. We need more of The Narwhal, The Tyee, and The Trillium. We need more of the growing number of independent publications dedicated to stopping journalistic decline in Canada. We need more non-profit newsrooms that are dedicated to diving into tough topics, providing news that people want, and remaining community-minded enough to allow for adaptability. And for the love of all that’s good in this world, we need to fight like hell to keep the CBC around when Pierre Poilievre becomes prime minister, because he’s already gleefully squeaking about how he’ll strangle it in its sleep. The CBC is flawed, it is lumbering, and it is an organization in need of desperate repair, but you can only repair something if it still exists.

But the loss of CHML is also a reminder that, to Canada’s corporate giants, Hamilton doesn’t matter. We are but an inconsequential little market beside Toronto that will take what it’s given. We’re not big enough to be worth their time and not important enough for them to care. But Hamilton does matter. It matters to all of us who are here, who have chosen to stay here and build something here and work everyday to make here just a little bit better for everyone.

Losing CHML means losing a connection to a past when this city knew that it mattered. In CHML’s glory days, it showed us a better version of ourselves. It covered local politics, carved out space for local talent, worked to show this country that the ambitious little city at the end of Lake Ontario was more than just a port and a few steel mills. It reminded us and everyone around us that this is a vibrant, diverse, energetic place, made better by each and every one of us who lives here. It helped people get involved, get informed, and get active in their community.

And that seems to be the biggest loss. Not just of CHML, but of a very real reminder of a time when things were closer to home, our media included. When a local radio station could pop up, built by people in the community, to serve the community.

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In 1986, after technical difficulties impacted CHML and CKOC for just two minutes on a Monday morning in June, Spec columnist Jerry Ormond wrote a lengthy reflection on the station, framed as an imaginary conversation between himself and a character he called “Mr. G. Hamilton Old-timer”. In the imaginary conversation, the “old-timer” complains about the technical hiccup. Ormond reassures him, saying the stations were “Just off for a couple of minutes.”

“Damn good thing too,” was the old-timer’s reply, “This city just wouldn’t be the same without CHML.”28

The Spec of Yesteryear

In lieu of a “Cool facts for cool people” this week, please enjoy this contextless advertisement from the Spec in 1926.